"Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any attention. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that x years later, i would recall it in such detail."

"Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me, there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?"

"Traveling with __ was always a bittersweet experience. The bitterness came at that time, the sweetness in happy retrospect."

"The beauty of being on holiday is talking to the air."

Have a good weekend ahead folks ;)

Tuesday, June 19, 2012 || 7:31 AM

1. Met a little boy about 10, who brings around a sketchbook and a black art marker where-ever he goes.

"I always sit on the back of the bus and everybody will think I'm playing by my own but I'm always drawing into my little book because my brain is overflowing with different ideas."A boy who doesn't draw stickmen, but sketches reflective of silhouettes. A boy who doesn't draw toes resembling jiggly jellybeans, but shoes which reminds me of Alexander Mcqueen.

"Who is Alexander Mcqueen?"

2. Chris, whom peck & I met in the rural areas in Chiangmai, planned Singapore as the last stop of his 3 week vacation. One single holiday of his triumphs most Singaporean's annual leave.

We, Singaporeans, are slaves to our jobs.

Slaving to a job you enjoy is alright, but slaving to a job you detest then slave, you really are.

Still find it funny when I recall him trotting to cooking lessons while peck & I went for Muay Thai training.

Chris's best friend is currently working in town, & even in England, the both of them speak everyday on the phone.What more can I say? *salute to their amazing friendship*

I feel a teeny weeny embarrassed about my low maintenance of friendships, fueled by um, convenience.

xx

Craving for waffles and salted caramel ice-cream. Craving for ice-cream with lots and lots of chunky gooey fillings.

Every time you make a snotty, snide, deprecatory, or disparaging comment about a woman’s weight, you implicitly endorse an unreasonable and unattainable societal standard for beauty that women are subjected to from the cradle onward. You contribute in a direct chain of causality to a culture of death that values women for the size of their jeans rather than the content of their character. You indulge in exactly the kind of time-honored platinum dickishness that has f-cked with the heads and hearts of countless women irrevocably. Enough’s enough. It doesn’t matter if weight-related assessments of women are meant in jest; lest we forget, C.S. Lewis in the Screwtape Letters points out that the most pernicious and insidious sort of cruelty is cruelty that masquerades as humor. After all, a lie can be disseminated so much more easily when it has a punch line.

There is absolutely no excuse for ignorance, apathy, insensitivity, and callousness about women who struggle with body image; eating disorders are an issue that affects us all. Eating disorders are not some fringe sociocultural issue, and its victims are not some barely on-the-map eccentric subset of the general run of humanity. I’ve been battling one myself for over a decade now, and I am far, far from alone. I stand shoulder to shoulder with ten million other women in this country who are also struggling with anorexia, bulimia, and/or binge eating disorder. Ten million women — and more than one in four between the ages of 18 and 30 — are suffering from a debilitating mental illness that consumes their lives and causes them untold daily psychological and physical anguish which you will never understand. And for one in ten of these women, the disease will claim them at a prematurely young age. If that’s not sobering, think of it this way: statistically speaking, in your lifetime, at least one woman you know and love will die of eating-disorder related complications. So if you wouldn’t crack bald jokes around a chemo patient or cripple jokes around a paraplegic, then you damn well better think twice before cracking fat jokes around women who are literally dying precisely because they’ve been told their whole lives that their human worth is derived from their physical appearance.

You know, I didn’t spontaneously wake up sick one morning. A lifelong destructive complex was triggered by — what else? — a boy taunting me about my weight at age 16. I went home, sobbed my little half-grown-up post-adolescent heart out, and resolved that never again would I give any boy the opportunity to condemn or dismiss me in that way. I would be skinny — or die trying. I succeeded at the former; I very nearly succeeded at the latter. I embarked with Captain-Ahab monomaniacal fervor on a quest to conform to my culture’s standard of “beautiful” — a quest that has haunted me, destroyed me, nearly killed me, a quest that landed me in the hospital over and over again with life-threatening dehydration, hypokalemia, and multiple kidney and heart failure scares. I can recall a host of times when some off-hand, idiotic, cruel remark by a guy — even if not directed at me — triggered a major relapse, or a major depressive episode, or at the very least, major psychological pain. Because your comments like that merely reinforce our conception of ourselves as sex objects on display to be ogled — our definition of ourselves as aesthetically appealing pleasure-vehicles whose chief purpose is functional.

But guess who wrote that definition?

It wasn’t us.

I’m not abdicating personal responsibility. Certainly, we women must take it upon ourselves to turn a deaf ear to the siren song of a sterile and superficial culture. And if men will persist in objectifying and denigrating us, we are ultimately tasked to ignore you as best we can or, when possible, to re-educate you. But at the end of the day, you could make being a woman in a world where womanhood is scorned a hell of a lot easier on all of us by personally committing to a radical new methodology: refusing to make negative comments about a woman’s appearance. Ever. Under any circumstances whatsoever. Balls to the wall, boys. Alleviating human suffering and bringing hope to the lost is not merely at your option. Loving people — loving them with every ounce of strength you’ve got, alleviating their suffering rather than exacerbating it, treating them with empathy and dignity and sensitivity and charity — is your obligation as members of the human race, a vocation you have no right to reject. When you’re an asshole, the echoes of your assholishness — and the lives destroyed in its wake — may be farther-reaching than you could ever imagine.

If you take nothing else away from this letter, take away these precepts:

Real men don’t feel the need to put others down to advance their own self-interest.

Real men don’t hurt others, even in good fun.

Real men don’t mistake caddishness for humor.

Real men appreciate real beauty that proceeds from the heart, demanding nothing more and settling for nothing less.

Real men take seriously their call to protect, preserve, and defend women.

Real men think before they speak.

It’s a hard line, but somebody’s got to hold it. Why not you?

Women everywhere will thank you.

Sincerely,
Donna Shute

Monday, June 11, 2012 || 7:01 AM

Swam till muscles were sore,

aching in glory and pain.

Am starting to re-revise the suitcase full of books i brought back from Shanghai. Pretty books still wrapped in their protective shells of plastic. Love the glossy covers and the musty smell of recycled paper. Sundays at Tiffany's a very light romance novel. If it was a flower, it would be a dandelion. Soft, fluffy and dreamy. A very vanilla prose.

The best book I have read which really sufficiently brought out the idea of romance would be 'The unbearable lightness of being'. Because it is brutally honest. The author manages to manipulate his characters to give life lessons to the readers, and he does it very very well. And a good book, I feel, doesn't give you life lessons based on that book solely. With every sentence, it will make you think. And your thoughts will never be confined to the chains of the paperback.

But you know, having some vanilla sometimes isn't a bad idea once in a while.

Love the evil eye glass beads! Jieying bought hell lot of stuff, she probably hauled home 20 dresses or something. LOVE it when i manage to spot good deals!

Sweet things are sweet only when the person who did that sweet thing is someone who you actually want him/her to be.

Spine-chilling shiver sweet VS you're such a darling sweet. And it's difficult to determine which you felt, because it might just be a mixture of both, weighing a little more on the former. A little tug on the latter because of something in-born - the C-leader, leading with his little bits of troops following faithfully behind. ompassion.

Saturday, June 9, 2012 || 8:11 AM

"Borrowed" my sis's blazer for work and received an angry text from her.

"Next time before you take my clothes, ask me.""Oh shit. You found out. Sorry!""Well, an empty hanger is pretty obvious. Send it to the drycleaners straight after work."

Was actually speaking to Rana from Bonjour-Singapore. She walked for MASH UP for Audi Fashion Fest, and I particularly love the look where she had colourful Indian Bindis over her forehead. At first I thought it was paint. Creating the look is one thing, being able to carry it off is another. Eludes a streak of bohemian and fun vibes. Strikingly similar to wearing a headband, except this is literally disposable fashion. So gonna it and see if it works for me.

Most impressive looks on the runways from Dior's couture over the years.

All under the artistic direction of John Galliano. Salute to the man, really.

I LOVE sequins. I'm still looking for that perfect sequined dress. If sequins have twin sisters, of course it gotta be glitter....I fell in love with everything glitter after it is always associated with unicorn pee. Just kidding, of course it's the debut of Miu miu glitter shoes which made me love these sparkly pretty things.

How can someone look so effortlessly PERFECT?

Tuesday, June 5, 2012 || 10:06 AM

Thank you Thought Catalog, this hits home.

"I don’t know how to be in a relationship. I know how to be a friend, I know how to be a daughter, I know how to be a sister but I don’t know how to have a partner — someone who is included in my day-to-day life, someone I go on vacations with and for whom I’m willing to travel to some horrible town to meet their parents. I’ve dated people before but it never turned into anything substantial. I pushed my lovers away until they had no choice but to end it themselves. I was petrified every step of the way. Of what, I’m not sure, but every time I started settling in to some routine, I’d retreat. It’d be easy to write myself off as a commitment-phobe or as someone who just hasn’t met the right person yet — both of which could be true — but it’s also something deeper, something far more serious than just jitters or dating a string of Mr. Wrongs. It’s a failure on my part, a type of shortcoming. Some people aren’t good at sports or have trouble understanding math. Maybe this is my weak spot. Maybe I just legitimately don’t know how to be in a relationship with someone.

The frustrating thing about all of this is that I actually want companionship. However, the second I start dating someone, I start to feel suffocated and look for a way out. I break plans, I make excuses, and for what? A movie night with my best friend? To be alone in my bedroom? To work? Why am I so quick to deny myself something I clearly want? It has always been self-sabotage. Nothing else. I’m so locked inside of myself at this point and I’m not sure if anyone will ever be able to get me out.

I’m the problem. I’ve had people who were ready to love me, ready to be my plus one, and I ran away from them screaming. In my head, I would rationalize it as them just being bugaboos and me wanting to be an independent woman but let’s be real, I’m just insane. I have emotional intimacy issues. Something happened to me that caused me to go into my shell but I’m not sure what it was. My whole life I’ve been surrounded by an abundance of love from family and friends, so I’m not exactly sure where it went wrong but it did."

Monday, June 4, 2012 || 12:24 AM

Prada's Summer Summer Hunting Bags (Saffiano Vernice)

Funny how I always relate Satchels to biblical figures. Was it John who carried the first satchel?

Seems a little too pretty to be taking this beauty into the forests, The Hunger Games would be a little more exciting if Katniss exactly drew out her arrows from one of these color-popping candies.

But then again, she would probably die the fastest because others would be able to see her from a mile away. One of my favourite Prada bags to date. Even though they have a striking resemblance to Cambridge Satchels, would still vote for this because they look much more chic. Especially love the blue ones.

Saturday, June 2, 2012 || 7:28 AM

Mum needed me to be in the office today while she stayed home to read the Bible.

Felt a little upset, Sat burnt. Hey, that's 50% of my weekends okay! But at least work isn't boring, was constantly doing stuff: typing, researching, visual work. The worst kind of work is when there is nothing to do! But yet, some people LOVE bumming around at work. Don't know what's going on in their minds. I'm too horribly limited to understand their sea-deep level sense of satisfactions.

Every weekend, there's an endless list of errands to run.

'Get the sense of satisfaction of ticking the check-boxes.'

If only the check-boxes are nicely drawn up. If only they really look like boxes, I'll go fit myself into one until it's Monday.

It's Saturday, 10.28PM, and I feel like it's a Monday.

WHERE ARE MY WEEKENDS?!

xx

Just cuz I feel like typing and forming sentences, I'm gonna do this short survey. It has pretty good questions.

Do you believe in god?Yes, I believe in a higher being. I believe there must always be a start to something. I do not relish the idea of formed religions though. Not yet, maybe when I'm older. But yes, I truly believe in a God.

What do you hope happens when you die? We return to being ashes, and contribute back to the huge life cycle happening on Earth. Read from a book somewhere, it says something like 'Death is a breakdown of our systems, our body can't take it anymore, so it resorts to being back to the initial stage - we return to being molecules, but this time round, a part of us can be found in the soil, the other somewhere in the sea.'

I like to think that death is an invisible existence, except more powerful, because you can be at so many places at once.

Do you believe that everything happens for a reason? Yes, I believe that what we are experiencing now is part of who we would be later. We might not know the reasons now, but it shall be unveiled as time goes. A heartbreak makes one stronger, so one can be the independent being one is capable to be. One decided not to go for a particular trip, because there might be a plane crash. One worked for mum on a Sat, because if she goes to Dempsey for lunch, she might get banged by a car.

Where do you believe consciousness comes from? Consciousness means being aware. Where does awareness come from? It comes from your brain functions, It comes from a healthy working brain, with all functions in sync.

Form or Function? Why is it 'or'? Mutually exclusive meh? I'm both a Form & Function girl! Really must choose one ah? Okay la, Form.

Top five albums?I don't know shit about albums. Sorry! But if you're talking about the best songs with an entire playlist I can listen to over and over again. It gotta be Backstreet Boys, Westlife, Grey Anatomy Soundtracks, and all the old school love song ballads.

Top five films? The Kite Runner, Aftershock, Pirates & The Carribeans, Sanctum, Taken.

Top five books?A million little pieces by James Frey, The unbearable lightness of being by Milan Kundera, all books by Jodi Picoult, Doctors by Erich Segal, The Road Less Traveled by M Scott Peck.

If you woke up in a room with a perfect clone of yourself (same experiences, memories, scars, etc), would you fight it to the death or fuck it?If it is truly my clone with the same personality and thoughts, we would probably plot something which goes along the lines of :Me: Okay clone, you stay in Sg for 3 months, while I go and travelClone: Waitttt whattt why?!! U stay, and I go travel!Me: No, U stay.Clone: Okay fine, I'll stay. But when you're back, it's my turn!Me: Sounds fair!

And if it's my clone, we would be surprised at first, but totally cool and apathetic after like a few hours.

Friday, June 1, 2012 || 6:29 AM

Unsuccessful tanning with kel! I didn't even grew darker by a teeny weeny bit :(

Kel, let's go tanning again soon, and this time round, let's choose A GOOD DAY (/ search weather forecast!)

Heng Hwa Cuisine. My FAVORITE. Parents used to go dating when they were younger in this eatery. Super nice food, love love love! And good prices too! They have the amazing ricecakes too. For people who like lots of flour-y stuff (like my dear stitchy), this is a MUST GO!! I've been dragging sooo many of my friends to this place ;)

I'm still looking for a place which sells red dates glutinous rice soaked in honey. Been missing it ever since I returned from Shanghai.

Lastly, check out this retro bicycle! Revamped, redesigned and rebuilt from scratch by a group of well-doers for Club Rainbow charity.

"I can totally imagine myself cruising down the streets of Paris buying baguettes."